"Literature and Lives" by Allen Carey-Webb

When it comes to the teaching of literature, there are, perhaps, as many didactic methodologies as there are literary genres. Until recent decades, literature has primarily been taught as a lecture course, the teachers apprising students of timeless truths about what literature means, and students eagerly soaking up those "truths", taking them at face value and never thinking about the variable criteria, such as authorial intent, social constructions of reality, both contemporary reactions and those of generations subsequent to the writing, implicit repressive devices that work through formalistic and rhetorical devices and ideological constructions working implicitly from beneath the literal, and the criteria that a work must have to be considered worthy of study, that may be having an impact on their lives, or may yet have an impact on their lives if they learn to analyze the literature from different worldviews. However, in an age when people are becoming increasingly sophisticated, refusing to be besotted by the fustian tirades of pompous preceptors who claim to be omniscient, their worldviews unable to be qualified, novel approaches to teaching literature have stormed to the forefront, attempting to penetrate a seemingly non porous structure to extract the life-giving fluids that minorities and the oppressed have been deprived of for so long, cracking the shell of the coconut to find the sweet milk that nourishes the mind, body, and soul. It is exactly these novel approaches that Allen Carey - Webb espouses in his book Literature and Lives.…